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Comment by jagged-chisel | Hacker News Reader

> Has anything ever grown that fast before?

Is it true growth, or circular dealing plus hype? I have little doubt the IPO is nothing but a wealth transfer from retail investors who'll be left holding an empty bag.

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I take no position on the correct valuation of Anthropic, but I think if you've used coding agents, it's pretty clear that it's not just hype; they really are a useful technology that can massively increase software engineering productivity.

As far as I know the circular deal fears are more around the chip purchasing agreements, because there is a speculative component to building out datacenters for training which may not produce models that are worth the training cost, but the revenue from inference is real and it has truly grown a lot over the past two years.

    > ...it's pretty clear that it's not just hype; they really are a useful technology that can massively increase software engineering productivity

Problem: Anthropic isn't the only provider. You can argue whether they are the "best" provider, but both GLM and DeepSeek exist and are really, really good. I was using Qwen offline on a trans-Atlantic flight on a 128GB MBP and output was totally acceptable.

Yea I am certainly not saying that Anthropic in particular is worth the valuation they are seeking or that they will end up a winner in the AI race; only that AI is not just hype, and that their inference revenue growth is real.

That's a beefy MBP! I imagine it was quite hot by the end of that flight if you were running Qwen the whole time

It was a hot-plate; could probably make some flapjacks on it...

Problem: Anthropic is the only provider.

Is a hypothetical, but is one that's an even higher risk factor for investors.

With the NASDAQ rule change, even more so.

https://ir.nasdaq.com/news-releases/news-release-details/nas...

That’s a good question that I assume will be cleared up in the prospectus, but I have to assume that enough of it is just cash coming in that they and OpenAI are likely the fastest growing companies of all time, or at least very high up the list.

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